Science in the Triangle

In November, the gaming industry will celebrate its 40th birthday. With the release of Computer Space in 1971, the future founders of Atari set in motion a phenomenon that would change the way people look at entertainment, learning and even medical training.

And for 30 years, Mark Cerny’s been right in the middle of it.

The creator of classic titles like Marble Madness and more modern blockbusters like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, Cerny’s had his hands on almost every evolutionary form of the video game, from the coin-op arcade to the next-gen shooter.

Ahead of his Thursday keynote titled “The Long View” at the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, Science in the Triangle caught up with Cerny over the phone from his office in Burbank, Calif., where he runs his own consultancy firm Cerny Games.

Mark Cerny

Q: What do you think has been most significant about the change you’ve seen in the video game world in the last 30 years?

If you look at where it was when I joined the game industry in 1982, the center of the games industry was the video game arcade. Some of the most popular home games were versions of the arcade games.

If you look at the late 80s, the center of the world was the PC. That’s where all the creative action was. The GDC that we know today was actually the CGDC — the Computer Game Developers Conference.

By the late 90s, very console-centric, with either cartridges or CDs. Now it’s moved again: Facebook, iPhone, iPad have shown huge recent gains in market share.

Q: In the early 80s, we saw a market saturated with pretty terrible games, then a subsequent crash. Do you see parallels here with the emergence of so many mobile applications?

One thing we should be aware of is those games were terribly expensive back in the day. If you went to the store and bought a game from the store for $40 in 1980 or 1982, taking into account inflation, that’s about $100 today. I agree that not all the games demonstrated that much play value, but today, these games you’re talking about are games you can play for a buck, or maybe $3. I think it’s a much healthier market today.

Q: What do you think the fragmentation we’re seeing in the gaming market means for video games?

Certainly the core console gaming market is getting soft. We saw a 5 or 10 percent decline in 2009 and about the same in 2010. I’ve been through some of the great crashes, and it does make me wonder a bit if we are headed for one.

Q: So is it just a wait-and-see situation at this point?

The diversity we have right now is really healthy. It’s nice to see so many people who wouldn’t normally spend much time on electronic entertainment going out there and playing these games.

I was in London two years ago and my cab driver had just discovered the iPhone and he was going crazy over the number of 99p games that he could buy. This was a guy who had never played games before.

On the biggest-level picture, it’s healthy because the audience is broadening dramatically through the iOS games and Facebook games.

Now, if I’m going out there and I want to create a 20-hour single-player experience for console that’s going to cost $50 million to develop, yes, there are implications for that, and I’m not sure the economics of that are as healthy today as they were three years ago.

Q: What still excites you about working in the video game industry?

This is my 30th year of making games, and I have to say the first half of that was not as interesting as the second half.

Until the original PlayStation came out, it wasn’t really possible to create the kind of game I personally was interested in making. I was a hobbyist programmer in the 1970s. My brother and I were trying to make a real-time 3D action RPG. Now needless to say, that’s a terribly ambitious thing to go after. We had a couple hundred thousand dollars of university equipment we were borrowing to do this. We were programming in punch cards. When I finally saw the game we were trying to make, it was called Final Fantasy VII.

Ironically, I got into arcade games, where the games were three minutes long or five minutes long, so I didn’t have a chance to make the games I was interested in making until I started collaborating with Naughty Dog on the Crash Bandicoot series and Insomniac on the Spyro the Dragon series. From that standpoint, Spyro the Dragon, which had narrative in it, was much closer to the vision I had as a child of what I wanted to make. That was just 1996.